Department of Justice - Updated

Version 1.1 of the Department of
Justice’s (DOJ) Open Government Plan makes significant progress
towards meeting the requirements of the Open Government Directive (OGD).
Specifically, Version 1.1 includes required links, and identifies data sets
available in Data.gov and specific new high value data sets it plans to release
in the future. DOJ staff participated in conference calls and a meeting with
the auditors and OpenTheGovernment.org staff, and they took advantage of this
constructive criticism to improve their plan. The revised plan provides
specific details and deadlines for implementing and sustaining their flagship
initiative, the FOIA Dashboard. In addition, the plan notes that DOJ will
review its FOIA regulations and initiate a rulemaking process this year to
ensure their consistency with the President’s goals of greater transparency.
The revised plan also details DOJ’s own performance in responding to FOIA
requests, and includes statistics on backlogs of the Department’s components
and their capacity to respond to requests.

Of particular note is that DOJ has agreed to make publicly
available a valuable collection of digital legislative histories and to provide
access to significant court filings through its Web site, along with an RSS/XML
feed so the public can track the briefs as they are posted. DOJ also committed
to attaching relevant court filings to press releases, which will be of great
value to the media, researchers and the public.

The revised plan ties disclosure, public participation and collaboration
with stakeholders directly to its mission. The expanded section on the FOIA
Dashboard in particular demonstrates the importance of the Department’s
leadership as the primary agency responsible for FOIA implementation across the
government.

The revised plan is a dynamic document, and the auditors
will be working closely with DOJ to ensure that the plan is effectively
implemented.

If you any think part of the agency's plan is impressive,
or you have concrete suggestions on how the agency could improve its plan,
please share your ideas with us using the form at the bottom of the page.